We're in the final stages of getting ready to go "live" with our new website and new library catalog next week, it's mid-year performance review time, mid-year budget time, and things are heating up on the fundraising front....so not much time to post to the blog!
I did have a chance to skim an interesting article Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading from this month's Harper's Magazine (Note that you have to be a Harper's subscriber to access the full text online!). It's by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my favorite authors.
The article is about the alleged decline in reading, and the "corporatization" of publishing. She starts by citing recent studies showing a decline in reading, such as the NEA report "To Read or Not To Read" and goes on to describe her perception that the period 1850-1950 was the "century of the book" - a time when technology made mass production and distribution of books, magazines, and newspapers possible, but before electronic media came to dominate as sources of news and entertainment.
One of the thought-provoking questions she raises is whether the decline in reading is as precipitous or as real as studies such as the NEA's would indicate -
"Even during what I have called the century of the book", when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren't there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don't know how many, because we didn't have polls to worry us about it."
It's a great point. As Le Guin goes on to point out
"...reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alerness - not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart into it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it."
Maybe the number of readers is "low" because people don't have the time, skill, confidence, or interest to be a reader....and maybe this has been true as long as books have been widely available.
The article both gave me hope that I am not alone in my inability to imagine a future without reading, and made me think of the role of the public library in a new way. It's not just about 'encouraging reading' in some broad, generic sense - it's about giving as many people as possible the skills, the exposure to good books, and the confidence to be "up to" being a reader.
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